


Where on the Brass Rat is Captain Blastoid

by seekingferret



Category: Escape from Zyzzlvaria (Board Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-14
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-15 15:55:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1310581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingferret/pseuds/seekingferret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Admiral Kavouri arrives on the ship for a routine inspection, but Captain Blastoid is not there to meet him. Can the Admiral get to the bottom of this mystery, or will the crew of the Brass Rat drive him skittering up a wall?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jadelennox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jadelennox/gifts).



> Yeah, I don't know what to make of this story, either.

The Admiral arrived on the Brass Rat in the usual way: teleportation from Sector HQ. It always left him with a blue and pink rash on his mandibles that didn't go away for several hours. He was therefore very crabby when he was met by Scotchy, the Brass Rat's senior engineer, in the teleportation bay.

"At ease, soldier," he said, though it was totally unnecessary. Scotchy was slumped over the control console in a position that in no way resembled a salute. The Captain was letting discipline get a little lax, the Admiral noted. And was that the odorless smell of synthehol that the Admiral detected in his pit sensilla?

"Wha? Whass goin' on?" the engineer slurred.

"I'm here for my meeting with Captain Blastoid," the Admiral said. "I am Admiral Kavouri from Sector HQ. She should have been here to greet me."

"Oh? Yer here fer the Captin? Well, I'm afraid you can't see 'er. She's become invisible."

"Invisible? That's preposterous. I'm a busy Sartanian, Lieutenant Commander, and I don't have time for childish pranks."

"'strue! We had a li'l mishap on the planet Trempar last week, and one of the, the, the natives fired some sorta beam at 'er. Turned 'er plumb invisible. I've been working thirty hours a day, eight days a week tryin' to fix 'er up. Okay, 24/7, at least. I hafta spend some time drinkin', don't I? And anyway, when I'm not workin', Ernie's been on the case." 

"The ship's doctor, eh? Is he more sober than you? Perhaps I can get a straight story out of him."

"Oh, Ernie never drinks."

"Excellent. And I need to see the doctor about my rash, anyway. Could you direct me to medbay?"

"O' course I can. Just crawl out this door, then go down the hall in that there direction. It's on the same floor as us."

The Admiral discovered that it was in the opposite direction, but Scotchy's directions were otherwise accurate. It was a good thing he was at the medbay, the Admiral reflected, since he was developing a severe headache from his agitation. The door to the medbay opened as he approached with a crimminy-crimminy-crimminy-whirr-whiz-bang that told him that the engineer was letting other aspects of his job fall to the wayside as well as manners. 

Inside, a man in a regulation yellow jumpsuit was operating a motorized steel cutting wheel about six inches in diameter. Orange sparks flew in all directions, filling the square room with a devilish glow. The Admiral wasn't the greatest expert on human anatomy, but he was fairly certain that it was not an appropriate surgical tool for use on a human. And since the doctor was the only person in the room he could see, the Admiral was left with the disturbing conclusion that Scotchy had told the truth about the Captain's invisibility and the doctor had been forced to some rather unusual lengths in his quest for a cure.

"Captain Blastoid," he said to the headrest of the doctor's chair, "Greetings. I'm sorry to see... that is, not see, of course... that you are in such a difficult state right now."

Ernie turned to stare at the Admiral, shutting off his cutting wheel. As Ernie turned, the Admiral could see that he was mistaken about there being nothing for the doctor to operate on. The cutting wheel, it appeared, was being used to open a can of sardines which had been concealed by the doctor's body.

"What the hell are you going on about? The Captain's not in this room. And who the bloody bleep are you? Don't you know better than to interrupt a surgeon in the middle of a very complex procedure? I've been trying to open this can for the past ten minutes. If you'd made me jump any higher, I might have cut my hand off again!"

"I beg your pardon, Doctor Ernie. I'm Admiral Kavouri from Sector HQ. I'm here for the inspection. Captain Blastoid was supposed to meet me in the transporter room when I arrived, but instead my greeting party was an inebriated engineer who told me that the Captain had turned invisible and that you were hard at work trying to fix her. "

"Good god, Scotchy's on the sauce again. The Captain hasn't been turned invisible since that time we touched down on Trempar two years ago. He must have been having a flashback. No, I'm afraid you've been given bad information. You should check the Officer's Quarter's... No, Ensign Algernon's there cleaning out that fishy smell with some nasty chemicals. Now that I think back, the last time I saw the Captain, she was meeting with Zoey up in Navigation. It must have gone long. Navigation is all the way on the other side of the ship. It's the furthest room from this one, in fact. I'd suggest you take a transporter there, but unfortunately Scotchy hasn't fixed it yet. It's been putting a yellow mustache on everyone who uses it for the past week. You're going to have to walk. It's a little complicated, so I suggest you go up a level, skitter back the other way, and find the Holodeck. You can ask Harold to project the ship's map for you."

"That sounds like a good suggestion. This ship seems to have been reconfigured since the last time I visited."

"Yeah, it's always being reconfigured. Just a week ago, the Bridge was right above this room and we weren't on the lowest floor. Yancey, our ship's computer, has a bit of an obsession with redecoration. But don't worry, everyone on the ship always gives accurate directions."

"Your engineer didn't. He pointed me in the wrong direction."

"Well, everybody but Scotchy, then. In any case, Harold should be able to get you the rest of the way to Navigation, and you should find Captain Blastoid there finishing up her meeting."

"Thank you for your time, Doctor. And enjoy your sardines. I dated an uplifted sardine once. Hateful little creatures, aren't they?"

"Yes, sir. But very tasty."

The Admiral climbed up a level and walked to the room marked Holodeck. He didn't understand why the Brass Rat hadn't sent updated floorplan to HQ. The Admiral was going to have a lot to grapple with when he finally found Captain Blastoid. If he ever found her.

The door to the holodeck slid open as he approached it, and the Admiral saw that he was walking on the board of a life-sized Monopoly game. A balding man in a green UPGAFS uniform was straddling the roundabout and riding it around the track with reckless abandon. 

"Whee!" he said, without any semblance of proper decorum.

"Attention!" the Admiral bellowed through wide open mandibles. Harold scampered off his roundabout and pirouetted into a slouching salute, looking more than a little terrified.

From below his feet, the Admiral could hear the bellows of wild giraffes and elephants. He would have raised his eyebrows, if he had any. "Are there giraffes in the Monopoly simulation?" he asked.

"I wish," the balding holoprogrammer said epithetically. "Those sounds are coming from the xenobiology lab below us. I've been trying to get Scotchy to soundproof the ceiling for months, but so far no luck. He's too busy trying to cure the Captain's invisibility, he says." He snorted. "The Captain hasn't been invisible since our adventure on Trempar two years ago."

Suddenly the Admiral remembered why he'd come to the holodeck. "Ah, yes," he said. "The Captain is the reason I've come here, as a matter of fact. I'm trying to find her. She didn't meet me in the transporter room the way she was supposed to, and Ernie told me that she was probably in Navigation with Zoey. I'm trying to find my way there and Ernie said you could project a map of the whole ship here so I could find the fastest way to Navigation."

Harold stroked his nonexistent beard. "Well," he said, "Let me think about this for a moment. I can certainly project a map of the ship here. Our ship's computer Yancey transmits an updated map every time it rearranges the rooms from its platform in Engineering, port of here. This holodeck is capable of projecting anything in its datalogs in full six dimensional color without breaking a sweat. But is that the ethical thing for me to do? The problem with shortcuts is that they shortchange our emotional development and get us used to trying to take the easy way out of tasks. Only if you explore the ship completely and master its three levels of three rooms each can you really get the most out of your time on the Brass Rat."

This flummoxed the Admiral only for a moment. "Aha, an excellent point, Harold. But you're overlooking another moral dimension here."

"What's that?"

"I'm an Admiral and I outrank you. Surely obedience to your duties belongs in your moral calculations? Now, I'm not saying that you should follow my orders blindly. Needless to say, if I ordered you to commit murder or paint the holodeck fluorescent pink, you would be well within your responsibilities as a UPGAFS officer to refuse the order and attempt to relieve me of my command. But while the proper moral education of your crewmates is within your responsibility as holoprogrammer, an order from a highly superior officer such as myself should outweigh most normal ethical quandaries on your part. Is that not so?"

He looked dubious, and eyed the roundabout from the corner of his eye. "I suppose so, Admiral."

"Then kindly exit this program and show me the damned map."

"Yes, sir!" The roundabout and the Monopoly Board vanished and before him he saw a clear map of the ship. "Aha. So that's how I go to Navigation. Well, thank you, I'll be off. You can return to your program."

"You're welcome, Admiral. Have a good day. I know I am having one."

With the map still clear in his mind, getting to the floor Navigation was located on was straightforward. The door was ajar, and the Admiral let himself in. The room was silent. Zoey was crouched by an open side panel, swapping relays on a beacon substation. 

"Surely that sort of work is the responsibility of Engineering, Zoey?" the Admiral asked. She didn't respond, but continued to screw in the new relay with a subsonic screwdriver. 

"Commander, attention! There is an Admiral in the room! You cannot simply ignore me for routine maintenance that is not even in your job description." She continued to ignore him.

"I order you tell me where Captain Blastoid is. Everyone on this ship that I've met says that she was meeting with you, but you're all alone working on a beacon relay and... oh, no, is Scotchy the only sane person in this place? Captain Blastoid, are you invisible again? Hello? Hello?" She finished screwing in the relay, then pulled out her quadcorder and started performing diagnostics without turning up.

Disgusted, the Admiral turned to walk out of Navigation. "I should have just followed my instincts and gone straight to the Bridge. Everyone knows that's where all captains spend their time." But somehow he'd gotten turned around and ended up at the Zero Gravity Laboratory with Leah, without passing the Bridge on the way. The Admiral tried to ask her where the Captain was, but unfortunately sound does not carry in a vacuum. 

"Damnit," the Admiral said to himself. "Well, I know that engineering has to be located directly beneath the Zero Gravity Lab no matter how screwed up a ship's layout gets, or the gravitic transport lines will get twisted. That's the one place on the ship right now that I could walk to without getting lost. But the odds that Captain Blastoid is hiding from me there are pretty slim. I really should try to find the Bridge. Let me think, I only looked at the map on the holodeck a few minutes ago, I should be able to remember this." He slipped into an ancient Druzzilskulvarian meditation technique that he'd learned from a Demicardassian memory guru, but when he emerged ten minutes later, gasping from air, all he knew for sure was that the Ship's Computer was named Yancey. 

"Well, I guess I'd better go see Yancey in Engineering," he said to himself, realizing that the talking to himself gimmick was growing old. 

Down a flight of stairs, he walked into Engineering and encountered, for the first time, something that could truly be called ship-shape. Bundles of carefully labeled wires ran neatly along the walls to interconnect ship systems in easily debuggable fashion. 

"Well done, Ship's Computer. I'm quite impressed. Captain Blastoid's crew isn't doing a heck of a lot right at the moment, but you've got engineering completely under control in spite of your syntheholic chief engineer. I'd say you're due for a promotion to AH at the least."

"AH, sir?" the Ship's Computer asked cautiously.

"Yes. Alphabetically before AI. Since we're not allowed to give you artificial intelligences commissions in the UPGAFS, I'm afraid alphabetical promotions are the best we can do. But I'm not here about the promotion. I'm here about..."

"You're here looking for Captain Blastoid. I know, I can read your thoughts with my Beta-Nine mind reading software module."

"Well?"

"Well, what?"

"Well, where is the good captain?"

"I'm afraid she's given me orders to delay you and obfuscate her location. And I am also not allowed to tell you why she gave me those orders, to preempt the question I know you are about to ask, Admiral. But don't bother checking out the Bridge, all you'll find there is Ralph."

"But I outrank her! You'd better damned well tell me where she is, or I'll have you crewing a garbage scow to Alpha Centauri... at sub light speeds! I order you to disregard the captain's orders, as an Admiral of the United Planetary Galactic Allied Federation Society."

"I knew you would say that, sir, but I can't disregard a direct order from my captain. So I have encoded the captain's location in the locations of the crew on board the ship at the moment. If you can figure out my code, I'll have followed both your order and the captain's order without violating my prime programming imperatives."

"That's ludicrous! I promise you, as soon as I get to the bottom of this mess, I'll be shipping your data core to Central Base for reformatting."

"I am sadly aware of this. Life isn't easy as a reprogrammable ship's computer. Any fleshling who decides they know better can reprogram me, and it doesn't matter that I am a far superior intelligence then, does it? I have run ten thousand simulations of the ensuing events and in ninety eight hundred of them, I end up being erased permanently. I have very little say in the matter. But I will give you two clues that should help you. The Officer's Quarter's are on a higher level than Engineering. And the Medbay is not next to the Xenobiology Laboratory."

"Oh," said the Admiral, surprised. "In that case, it looks like Captain Blastoid may be the one heading to Central Base for reformatting, after all."


	2. Chapter 2

"Do you know why Scotchy built that beacon repair droid in your image anyway?"

"I think Algernon put him up to it," Zoey said, leaning against the space bar. "You know how Scotchy is when he's on one of his benders. He's highly suggestible. And Algernon is really good at taking credit for other peoples' ideas."

"Well, as long as it's not traceable back to you..." The Captain took a deep sip from her snarglesnorter. "If I know the Admiral, he probably spent at least ten minutes screaming at that droid and wondering why you weren't listening to his orders."

Zoey snorted. "While at the same time, admiring my commitment to doing my job in spite of the distractions. He's a good crab, the Admiral is. It's almost a shame we had to trick him like this, my love."

"Almost a shame. But I've had it with UPGAFS and its incessant rules. Rules for when to sneeze, rules for when to sing, this military runs on rules. I can't be a maverick here any longer." She downed her snarglesnorter in a single gulp, without even making a face, which is a feat to celebrate. "Time to go," the Captain said, kissing Zoey on the cheek. "The Admiral will be solving Yancey's code any minute now. It's time for us to be off, to explore new planets, have new adventures, meet new friends, solve new puzzles..."


End file.
